Crossbow Endgame, Reloading, Rolling, Unresponsiveness

I'm playing level 4-6 maps at the moment and finding the (mercenary-gemling) crossbow gameplay quite clunky and sometimes tedious.

The main reason is how crossbow works... well, actually how it does not scale well into the endgame

TLDR
Reload gets stuck when rolling, so attack gets stuck too.
Getting reload time reduction has huge diminishing returns and even at max reduction its too slow to be usable, while also needing to invest in atk speed. It is just too clunky for the endgame. We need to be able to make it fast. Also bolt switching must be more responsive.


FULL POST
During the campaign I used a mix of 3 grenades and explosive shot (for crowds) OR rapid fire (for single dps) and while somewhat complicated, it performed well.

To maximize the damage, I switched between 2 xbows: one for throwing more grenades and one with more damage.

After all, by looking at the mercenary tree, it feels natural to build with FAST swap, and the crossbow itself is all about switching bolts (also having its strongest passive about switching bolts multiple times in a short time).

However, even taking all the reload passives, multiple attack speed / skill speed passives, ditching all the strong "+damage -speed" nodes, and getting the weapon swap speed bonus, the amount of time needed to set up a group kill did not work well when reaching endgame.

The maps require fast clearing, mobility, damage and defenses.
So investing in all that stuff (plus accuracy) was not cutting it.

I decided to drop the grenades, the second crossbow, the swap speed, and basically only focus on 2 bolts: Glacial Bolt and Explosive Shot.
So freeze the enemies, then blow the walls + ignite.

That was an improvement, but exacerbated a huge issue: reload / attack getting stuck.
When you roll, reload is lost. Sometimes keeping the attack clicked will not re-trigger reload, which means you won't attack, and this happens ALL THE TIME.
On top of that, if you try to swap bolts during reloads the bolts won't swap, making you fire the wrong skill.
Just juggling TWO bolts feels broken, more is just unrealistic, and this is with speed increase, reload capped, even nimble reload slotted (actually only gives <0.1 seconds due to diminishing returns)
The maximum frustration comes from enemies with shields: rolling behind them and firing takes so much time that they just turn around unless you kite their attack too.

In conclusion, it just feels like it's not scaling correctly into the endgame part.

We should be able to reduce the reload significantly or have some way to reload the bolts not in use, and we definitely need some override where if you switch bolts it just cancels the character's action and swaps.


I hope this helps, I liked very much playing this class / weapon up to this point and would love to bring it into the endgame if this gets improved!

One trick is to use two crossbows and bind crossbow shot from one to left click and the other to right click. You preload explosive shot in one and glacial shot in the other. Now you auto switch by just clicking left or right button. Like what you were doing with grenades but for two crossbow shot types.

Roll canceling reload does suck.

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fouquet#0993 wrote:

One trick is to use two crossbows and bind crossbow shot from one to left click and the other to right click. You preload explosive shot in one and glacial shot in the other. Now you auto switch by just clicking left or right button. Like what you were doing with grenades but for two crossbow shot types.

Yeah but that only works the first time you shoot, then if you fired without reloading (e.g. for roll) you are back to square one.

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Macellomatik#7988 wrote:

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fouquet#0993 wrote:

One trick is to use two crossbows and bind crossbow shot from one to left click and the other to right click. You preload explosive shot in one and glacial shot in the other. Now you auto switch by just clicking left or right button. Like what you were doing with grenades but for two crossbow shot types.

Yeah but that only works the first time you shoot, then if you fired without reloading (e.g. for roll) you are back to square one.

yeah it doesn't stop reloading but it solves ammo switching at least between 2 ammo types.

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fouquet#0993 wrote:

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Macellomatik#7988 wrote:

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fouquet#0993 wrote:

One trick is to use two crossbows and bind crossbow shot from one to left click and the other to right click. You preload explosive shot in one and glacial shot in the other. Now you auto switch by just clicking left or right button. Like what you were doing with grenades but for two crossbow shot types.

Yeah but that only works the first time you shoot, then if you fired without reloading (e.g. for roll) you are back to square one.

yeah it doesn't stop reloading but it solves ammo switching at least between 2 ammo types.

Ah, sorry, now I get what you are saying... that's true.

But sadly that implies finding 2 mirror weapons + 3 points in fast swap + most likely still losing 0.1s each swap JUST to bypass the unresponsiveness.

My brain blocked out the option of using the swap like that :D

Reload needs to be standardized and then seriously bugfixed.

Here's what I don't like about reloading crossbows:

1) There's an entire base of crossbows I'd never bother building around because +1 bolt doesn't make up for its atrocious reload stat (1.1~ sec) whereas most other crossbow bases easily get .80 or lower before anything else is taken into account.

2) The crossbow "jamming" bug (firing nothing) after reload needs to disappear completely from the game, it kills me every now and then for no reason.

3) Not being able to reload more smoothly between or even during rolls makes crossbows feel super clunky. Meanwhile bows run the game over, no reload required.

Yeah it is suboptimal.

One thing you can do with it though is specialize your crossbows to your two ammo skills. Cold damage and freeze buildup on the glacial bolt crossbow and fire/physical on the Explosive shot crossbow.

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fouquet#0993 wrote:

Yeah it is suboptimal.

One thing you can do with it though is specialize your crossbows to your two ammo skills. Cold damage and freeze buildup on the glacial bolt crossbow and fire/physical on the Explosive shot crossbow.

Yes I read your other post where you also suggested using two crossbows and then were told the problem with that idea. I'm all for trying to make the experience better with what we have now but I am certain that Crossbows need game developer help, not awkward and wildly expensive workarounds to issues no other ranged class ever has to deal with. Furthermore if I did use such a workaround I would be locking myself out of other potential weapon swaps which may prove to be more useful to whatever build.